Professional Development
Most of what new teachers learn in their first five years comes from other teachers. Building a deliberate professional network, online and in-person, is one of the most under-rated career investments.
The standardized testing landscape is fragmenting. The federal foundation remains; the state-by-state changes have shifted the picture. An honest current state.
The two-minute end-of-class check is the cheapest, most consequential teaching tool most teachers under-use. What makes exit tickets effective and what makes them performative.
Honest reviews of the apps, platforms, AI tools, and devices teachers are asked to adopt. We assess what genuinely helps students think, what just keeps them busy, and what's heavily marketed without earning its place.
“AI tutors for kids: what’s worth using and what isn’t”
28 posts
Reading, writing, and thinking in a media environment that wasn't built in students' interest. We cover information literacy, source evaluation, attention, and what it means to be a careful reader and a credible writer online.
“What students should know about AI-generated content before using it”
26 posts
What happens to teaching when policy meets practice. We write about school systems, assessment regimes, district decisions, and the quiet politics that shape what's possible inside the classroom.
“State testing in 2026: what’s been kept, what’s been dropped”
22 posts
How real classrooms work, lesson by lesson. We write about instructional design, classroom practice, and the small craft decisions that shape what students actually learn, separating durable pedagogy from passing fashion.
“Using exit tickets to drive next-day instruction”
20 posts
Notes on how teachers actually grow. We cover conferences worth attending, PD that doesn't waste a Saturday, and the case for treating educators as career-long learners rather than topped-off skill sets.
“Building a personal learning network as an early-career teacher”
18 posts
MOOCs, course platforms, bootcamps, and the rest of the open-web learning economy. We cover where online courses deliver, where they don't, and how adults are actually picking up new skills outside traditional classrooms.
“How to evaluate an online course before you pay for it”
12 posts
A reflection on how tools like Diigo and emerging e-book platforms are transforming reading from a solitary act into a social, conversational experience, and what that means for new literacies.
A look at how Concord School, a special needs school in Victoria, used open source and homegrown social tools—blogging, photo sharing, bookmarking, and game-making—to document learning and prepare students for a global networked world.
A visit to Wooranna Park Primary School in Melbourne shows what it looks like when students truly drive the learning—from designing their own spaces and curriculum themes to running a parliament-style school government and creating original performances, all grounded in inquiry and a belief that learning is nonlinear and self-directed.
From the “Building the Compelling Case Department” comes this piece in the Harvard Graduate School of Education magazine Ed. about how students are already learning in social networks, why their emerging skills matter, and why educators must engage these tools themselves to help students use them to their full learning potential.
A study on the “participation divide” in digital content creation suggests that online publishing remains unequally distributed by social background, creating a two-tiered system of contributors and consumers—and underscoring the need to teach these technologies in all classrooms, especially in lower socio-economic areas.
We keep finding ourselves using less and less paper in our lives, yet schools and workshops are still overflowing with it. If our students’ futures won’t be paper-based, we need to start doing as much as we can to get off paper now.
We’ve been running into school Internet filters more than usual lately, and the problem seems to be getting worse instead of better. When teachers and even administrators can’t reach basic tools like Gmail, Google Docs, YouTube, or Wikipedia, it not only leaves students unprepared for the unfiltered world they actually live in, it also undermines the professionalism of educators. The only way students and teachers will ever really master the Web is by being allowed to use it.
So the unending debate over whether or not reading on the Internet is “really” reading gets played out once again in this New York…